It Pays to Trust Your Gut

Daniel Terdiman
01.07.05

In Blink, author Malcolm Gladwell argues that people frequently make some of their best decisions in mere seconds.

If the premise of Blink has any merit, then by the time you're reading this sentence, you've likely already made some snap judgments about this story. Perhaps that's because you read the author's previous book, the best-selling Tipping Point, or enjoyed his many magazine articles or even have feelings about stories written by the writer of this review.

In Blink ($26, Little, Brown), author Malcolm Gladwell makes the argument that people frequently make some of their best decisions in mere seconds. We think without thinking, sizing up situations and determining how we feel about someone or something based not on voluminous new information, but rather on our accumulated experiences. And, Gladwell says, that's a good thing.

Blink is rife with wonderful anecdotes of what Gladwell, a staff writer at The New Yorker, calls "thin-slicing." That is, people reacting to the barest of new information and arriving at smart decisions others with more information couldn't make.

He begins the book in 1983 with the purchase, by Los Angeles' Getty Museum, of what it thought was a priceless Greek statue known as a kouros. The museum did its due diligence, consulting scientists and lawyers, who, after careful inspection, agreed that the piece and its documents were the real deal.

But only after giving the seller $10 million did the Getty take the kouros to a new set of experts, this time art historians and specialists in Greek sculpture.

Evelyn Harrison, one of those experts, recalls in the book seeing the kouros.

When the curator pulled the cover off the kouros, he said it wasn't theirs yet, but would be in a couple of weeks. "And I said, 'I'm sorry to hear that.'"

Harrison, and subsequently other experts, needed just one look to know that the Getty had been taken. But how did they know when the Getty itself and its scientists and lawyers had spent so much time verifying the kouros' authenticity?

Gladwell's thesis, written in an easy, flowing, confident prose, is that more information is not necessarily better, even though society is primed to believe careful thought is always preferable.

"We live in a world that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it," he writes. "And what do we tell our children? Haste makes waste. Look before you leap. Stop and think. Don't judge a book by its cover."

But Gladwell argues powerfully that, in fact, thin-slicing is precisely the kind of thinking that, evolutionarily speaking, has kept us alive.

"When you walk out into the street and suddenly realize that a truck is bearing down on you, do you have time to think through all your options? Of course not," he posits. "The only way that human beings could ever have survived as a species for as long as we have is that we've developed another kind of decision-making apparatus that's capable of making very quick judgments based on very little information."